Leveraging Threat Intelligence for Incident Response

Incident Response

Posted on: September 29, 2020

False positives have always been the Achilles heel of incident response operations. Incident response teams spend a tremendous amount of time and effort to manually sort through data to assess threats, devise mitigation strategies, and put them into execution. Integrating threat intelligence with incident response operations helps security teams reduce false-positives by enriching and verifying incident data from multiple trusted sources.

What is the Role of Threat Intelligence in Incident Response?

As threats go undetected, organizations pressurize their incident response teams to become faster and more effective at detecting and dissolving them. Incident response teams need to respond as quickly as possible to stop data exfiltration. In order to effectively tackle threats, organizations must quickly escalate serious threats to their incident response team and these teams must react faster to neutralize the threats, with threat intelligence playing a crucial role in both of these areas.

With too many alerts and intrusion attempts, incident response teams are overwhelmed with information. This is where threat intelligence plays a role in making the information more actionable, helping organizations distinguish between low-level and high-level threats. By providing actionable information about threats, they know when to escalate a threat and how to prioritize all of the incoming alerts.

Using threat intelligence, incident response teams can analyze multiple sources of information. Threat intelligence allows incident response teams to identify threats faster, dissolve attacks with less damage, and quickly respond to prevent adversaries from causing any further disruption.

Threat intelligence reduces the time that incident response teams spend in reactive mode by facilitating several capabilities such as identifying and disbanding false positives, enhancing alerts with real-time context, compiling information from varied data sources, and scoring threats based on an organization’s needs. With such capabilities, threat intelligence equips incident response teams with meaningful insights to make faster and more informed decisions. Moreover, threat intelligence helps minimize the irrelevant alerts that hinder the incident response process.

With incident response being a critical aspect of an organization’s security posture, technology platforms are becoming vital for making incident response more effective and efficient. Organizations employ incident response platforms to aid security teams in identifying and investigating incidents faster, and automating relevant processes to provide a quicker response. Incident response platforms can be integrated into SIEM and other security tools to collect incident data, triage it, add context to create incident timelines, and fuse it with threat intelligence to identify incidents with minimum efforts.

Focusing on the bigger picture of the threat landscape, incident response teams are moving beyond incident response. With advancements in technology, they are employing threat response strategies that include all the facets of cyber threats, and these strategies are implemented using threat response platforms. An advanced threat response platform leverages innovative technologies such as cyber fusion that helps in connecting the dots between different threats and incidents, giving a holistic view to the threat response teams. Moreover, cyber fusion empowers different internal security teams such as threat intelligence, security operation centers (SOC), threat hunting, and vulnerability management to collaborate working on a common threat response platform to provide an effective response. Powered with real-time threat intelligence and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technologies, threat response platforms accelerate and improve security operations.

How does Threat Intelligence Improve Incident Response?

Faster Incident Response

Using threat intelligence, incident response teams can quickly and more effectively respond to a threat based on insightful information about adversaries and their attack methods.

In-Depth Threat Analysis

Threat intelligence provides incident response teams with an in-depth analysis of every threat, helping them analyze the different techniques that adversaries can use. This improves the overall security of organizations and protects their network from new vulnerabilities.

Improved Efficiency

Threat intelligence helps security teams to streamline incident triage, investigation, and actioning within an automated response workflow. This improves response speed , allowing for more time to focus on actual threats.

Improved Risk Management

With cybercriminals continuously looking for new vulnerabilities to penetrate an enterprise’s network, threat intelligence provides proper visibility into identifying new vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of data loss. Additionally, it helps in blocking and minimizing the damage in day-to-day operations.

Cost Savings

If the response to a data breach is slow, organizations can lose more money. Threat intelligence helps identify data breaches and enables security teams to mitigate them quickly, minimizing the overall expense.